[Bruce Bailey]
> If someone wants a particular html document in ascii, I would argue
> that the burden falls to him to convert it himself.
It's not hard: lynx -dump on any UNIX or DOS box with Lynx installed;
there are services on the 'net that will do this. There even used to
be e-mail Web proxies; are any of them still around?
> Another work around is to use line feeds (^L) as soft returns and
> carriage returns (^M) as the end of paragraph marks, but this is not
> very common.
I should say not: ^L is a page break, not a line feed. That would be
a pretty odd-looking document. I assume you meant ^J, but the problem
with that proposal is that both ^J and ^M are in use: UNIX uses line
feeds (^J) at the end of every line; Macintosh uses carriage returns
(^M), and DOS/Windows uses CRLF (^M^J). Adopting any other use for
these extremely characters would cause a fair bit of chaos.
-Chris
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